The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Apple updates App Review Guidelines to crack down on AI nudify apps and apps that reveal undocumented capabilities, like nudification, after app review (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) [21d]
Sources: Anthropic pitched its own AI safety bill to US lawmakers; the bill would limit the circumstances in which the government could block a model's release (Owen Dahlkamp/Politico) [21d]
CEO Amjad Masad says Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, citing cost and saying "ChatGPT is better now"; source: the partnership is still in place (TechCrunch) [21d]
Sources: Apple has hired Scott Tucker, Meta VP and deputy general counsel, as its new litigation chief, as part of a shakeup in its legal team (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [21d]
Apple says demand for iPhone Duo has been "nothing short of extraordinary"; deliveries slipped to late January within hours of preorders opening (Michael Acton/Financial Times) [21d]
Filings: Meta reduced its $65M midterms budget by $25M through refunds, primarily from a super PAC it launched in 2025 with $45M to fight state AI bills (Theodore Schleifer/New York Times) [21d]
Anthropic says Claude traced NIST's ECDSA curve seeds to a pseudorandom number generator, challenging decades-old suspicions of an NSA backdoor in the algorithm (Anthropic) [21d]
Sources: SoftBank weighs buying US security services giant Allied Universal at an ~$18B equity valuation, as Masayoshi Son explores deploying AI-powered robots (Bloomberg) [21d]
Sources: Elon Musk approached Trump with the idea of slowing down Starshield in Ukraine; source: Trump agreed, paving the way for DoD to execute the slowdown (Joe Barnes/Telegraph) [21d]
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group delays the general availability of PostgreSQL 19 after LLM-assisted code reviews uncovered architectural defects (Lindsay Clark/The Register) [21d]